Gov’t report: data-mining sucks, is useless

08Oct08

Cory Doctorow on boingboing says: “A multi-year National Research Council review of data-mining as a means of discovering terrorists has concluded that this just doesn’t work very well, and that it ends up harming and harassing — and terrorizing — innocents whose only crime is to have a profile that some database-designer thinks is hinky.”
Declan McCullagh on Cnet explains: “…”is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts.” Inevitable false positives will result in “ordinary, law-abiding citizens and businesses” being incorrectly flagged as suspects.”